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If you’ve been to a tech conference in the last few years, chances are you’ve heard about virtualization and its magical capabilities. But according to CA Canada boss Jimmy Fulton, many companies are spending more time talking about the technology than actually implementing and using it.

“We haven’t seen a lot of virtualized environments running large pillar applications [in Canada],” Fulton told a group of journalists at CAWorld Monday.

With that said, Fulton does expect the floodgates to open at some point during 2009. He said that many of CA’s customers have started to insist that virtualization-related clauses get written into all new contracts they sign with the IT giant.

Fulton said that this coincides with the Canadian market’s more deliberate and cautious adoption of emerging technologies. The demand for security, process and project management exploded in the U.S. 12 to 24 months before it saw significant traction in Canada, he said.

“Virtualization is a concept that is going to stick around,” Fulton added. “The implementation of the concept might change on evolve over the next few years, but like the Internet, it’s not going away.”

The problem for most Canadian companies and their adoption of emerging technologies like virtualization, he said, is the years of technology baggage that comes with most large enterprises IT environments.

“Look at the banking institutions in Canada,” Fulton said. “They’ve been around for a long time. They have collected mainframe technology from multiple vendors over the last 30 years.”

Most of these companies have a smattering of client server technology, some AS/400s, UNIX, and now Linux on the mainframe, he added.

“Each new layer of technology comes in small chunks and never really displaces the existing technology,” Fulton argued. These factors are playing a significant role in virtualization implementations.